MDC led a major school guidance reform initiative, funded by the Lilly Endowment, from 1991 to 1996 designed to raise the educational achievement and college-going rates of all students.

The program drew on MDC's recognized capacity in leadership development and our success at galvanizing attention to the needs of youth through America’s Shame, America’s Hope: Twelve Million Youth at Risk, a national examination of state responses to the problems of at-risk youth funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and published by MDC in September 1988.

It became a prototype for the multi-year foundation-funded demonstration projects that are the core of MDC's current business model.